Hezbollah (37 page)

The migration from Amal to Hezbollah was by no means unique to Mohamad. Pictures investigators seized from the homes of Charlotte Hezbollah cell members included shots of members posing with weapons in their roles as Amal militants taken when they were still in Lebanon. Most of the militants held automatic weapons, but some carried rocket-propelled grenade launchers and others posed while loading mortars into a launching tube.
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By the time the group had come to Charlotte, it had turned a full 180 degrees away from Amal and toward Hezbollah. On learning, in a telephone conversation captured by the FBI, that two Hezbollah fighters had been killed by Amal and not Israel, Hammoud curses the group: “May God damn them. I swear to the great God, they are a second Israel.”
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In a home video found in Mohamad’s residence in Charlotte and presented as evidence at his trial, Mohamad’s nieces and nephews are urged by an adult voice off-screen—identified by Mohamad as his sister—to tell their uncle who they are. In response the children raise their fists and yell, “Hezbollah! Hezbollah!”
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In the video, the children are wearing Martyrs Foundation sweatshirts. The foundation is a massive entity that openly concedes to supplying charitable funds to the families of Hezbollah suicide bombers. In July 2007, the Treasury Department designated the Martyrs Foundation as a terrorist entity tied to Hezbollah. Beyond the foundation’s work raising funds for Hezbollah, Treasury identified several cases
in which its officials were directly involved in supporting terrorism. The Treasury action also targeted the Dearborn, Michigan–based Goodwill Charitable Organization, exposing the charity as a front for the Martyrs Foundation. In some cases, Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon instructed members and supporters in the United States to send contributions for the group to Goodwill Charitable Organization.
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In 1990, Mohamad’s older brother, Chawki Hammoud, obtained a temporary exchange visa issued at the US embassy in Damascus, and in August of that year he flew to New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. Admitted into the country for six months, he overstayed his visa. He later entered into a sham marriage in order to obtain status as a lawful permanent resident, and moved to Charlotte.
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Another brother, Bassam, was already in the United States.
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The younger brother, Mohamad, would arrive not three months after the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires.

Mohamad Hammoud’s travel to the United States appears to have been directed by Sheikh Abbas Harake, a Hezbollah military commander with whom Hammoud had worked in the past. Harake sent Hammoud to the United States to build a network that could raise funds and procure materials for Hezbollah. According to some analysts, his mission was more alarming still: to “help create a hidden network ready to spring into action when ordered.”
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For reasons unclear, Mohamad was denied a US visa at the US embassy in Damascus three separate times. Undeterred, he and two of his cousins flew to Venezuela, where they lived with an uncle for forty days on idyllic Margarita Island, long identified as a hotbed of Hezbollah supporters and “a congested traffic point for Hezbollah operatives” entering or exiting South America.
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Eventually, Hammoud made it to the United States on a fraudulent visa he purchased with the help of his uncle. Hammoud and two of his cousins, Ali and Mohamad Darwiche, then flew to New York on June 6, 1992.
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Hammoud would claim it was merely coincidental that the three traveled to New York on three separate flights that arrived all around the same time. Hammoud later testified that it was “a funny story” that admittedly was “hard to be believed”: “I got lost in the airport and I went in the wrong airplane. All [that] I understood at that time, New York, I heard people saying in New York—and just I went. And all of a sudden I was coming to an airplane—I left my cousins in [a] different airplane and they went in a different one and I knew that I was completely in the wrong airplane and the wrong place.”
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More likely, traveling on different flights signaled sophisticated terrorist tradecraft, a skill with which Hammoud was credited by law enforcement officers assigned to his case.
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He kept below the radar, and meticulously stuck to the cover story, or legend, that he first laid out on arrival in New York in summer 1992. Describing Hammoud, Stanley Bedlington, a retired senior CIA counterterrorism analyst, said, “He is sharp as a tack…. Under cross-examination, he didn’t wilt. He looked straight at the jury. He tried to charm them.”
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At JFK Airport, immigration inspector Stephanie Gaines interviewed the three men attempting to enter the United States from Venezuela. She quickly determined that Hammoud’s visa was a “pretty bad quality fraud,” reached the same conclusion
about his cousins’ passports, and deemed all three men inadmissible to the United States.
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But the three Hezbollah supporters had anticipated such an outcome and were well prepared for it. They petitioned for political asylum.

A complete fabrication, the cover story was plausible; like the best of lies, it had grains of truth and was set against a historically accurate scenario. Hammoud claimed to be caught between Hezbollah, which was forcibly recruiting youth like himself from the Shi’a slums he was trying to escape, and the Israeli army’s Lebanese proxy militia, the South Lebanon Army (SLA). Hezbollah now suspected him of being an informant for the SLA and its Israeli masters.
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At JFK Airport, Hammoud told inspector Gaines that he feared he would be harmed if he returned to Lebanon.
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Mohamad and his cousins were admitted to the United States and given a date for a hearing before an immigration examiner. Within hours, they were on the streets in New York, and not long after that in Charlotte. Like many others in the Hezbollah network Mohamad would soon head, he would enter into a sham marriage of convenience—some would enter several—to obtain permanent residency in the United States. All told, seven individuals were involved in twelve phony marriages in the Charlotte cell, including two men who married lesbian partners.
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It took Mohamad Hammoud three tries before a marriage got him a green card in July 1998.
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Angie Tsioumas, the manager at the Domino’s pizza franchise where Hammoud worked, noticed that several of her employees took off days or weeks at a time, sometimes months, and found out they were driving cigarettes up to Michigan for Hammoud. She wanted in, and soon was making runs to Detroit for $500 a trip. A month later, she quit her job at the pizza shop and started managing the cigarette smuggling. “She was the brains of the operation,” investigators believed.
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Soon she and Mohamad were married, even though both were married to other people at the time. Ten months later, Hammoud had his coveted green card in hand.

Angie Tsioumas was knee-deep in the cigarette smuggling operation, to be sure, but she also appears to have had at least some knowledge of her husband’s ties to Hezbollah. Aside from the Hezbollah videos he would screen at their home, he also indicated that the FBI might have more than a passing interest in his activities. During her husband’s trial, Tsioumas testified that when she told Mohamad they would need a background check to qualify for a Small Business Administration loan to purchase a gas station, her husband became uneasy and said, “I wonder how far in depth they search things.” When she pressed him about his question, Mohamad mentioned that he was concerned that the FBI had files on him. When Angie pressed even further, however, Mohamad simply stated that there were some things his wife was better off not knowing about him.
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When prosecutors first began to put together a case targeting a group of cigarette smugglers of Middle Eastern descent, they thought the situation was pretty much cut and dried. Then the FBI came knocking and informed the prosecutors that
the group of smugglers identified by local law enforcement officers as petty thieves was actually affiliated with Hezbollah. As early as 1991, the FBI had expressed interest in some of the more radical members of Charlotte’s Shi’a community.
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The FBI ran an intelligence investigation—running sources, tapping phone lines, the works—overseen by the bureau’s International Terrorism Operations Section. “Operation Smokescreen” resulted in criminal charges being filed against twenty-six individuals for contraband cigarette trafficking, money laundering, racketeering, wire fraud, conspiracy, visa and marriage fraud, and material support to a terrorist organization. The financial investigation alone included some 500 bank and credit card accounts, and the overall investigation encompassed so many agencies that it led to the formation of the North Carolina JTTF.
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In early 1995, Detective Robert Fromme of the Iredell County Sherriff’s Office was working off-duty as a security officer at the JR Tobacco store in sleepy Statesville, North Carolina, when he noticed a group of individuals of Middle Eastern descent entering the store with plastic grocery bags stuffed with tens of thousands of dollars in cash. Suspicious, he watched as they purchased enormous quantities of cigarettes almost daily, walking off with 1,000 to 4,500 cartons at a time. Each man purchased 299 cartons, just under the legal limit. He observed as they loaded their cars, vans, and trucks and got on the highway heading toward Virginia or Tennessee. To be sure they were in fact crossing state lines, potentially violating federal law, Fromme followed them to the North Carolina state line. Then he contacted federal counterparts at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) and learned he had stumbled on a cigarette diversion ring, a pretty typical and lucrative criminal scheme in which cigarettes are purchased in bulk in places where tobacco tax is low and transported to states where the tax is high. “Typically,” Fromme and his FBI counterpart Rick Schwein would later write, “a carton of cigarettes costing $14 in North Carolina would sell for $28 in Michigan,” which is where the Hammoud brothers shipped theirs, making an average of $13,000 profit per van load.
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At the height of its operation, the network ran three to four minivans loaded with cigarettes up to Michigan each week.
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Over time, the drivers were pulled over for various reasons by police in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee and found to be transporting 400 to 1,400 cartons of untaxed cigarettes. In response, white women were recruited to replace the young Middle Eastern men as drivers. Sometimes drivers were sent in pairs, a man and a woman posing as a couple. Often, bike racks were hitched to the vans to create the appearance of a family on vacation.
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“Is it criminal activity? Yes,” Rick Schwein noted. “But it’s more. It’s tradecraft.”
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According to the FBI, at least a dozen other Hezbollah cells across the United States were running operations similar to Hammoud’s.
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Investigators calculated the Charlotte Hezbollah cell purchased more than $8.5 million worth of cigarettes, making an estimated $2 million in profits.
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Based on receipts from charities tied to Hezbollah found in Mohamad Hammoud’s home, prosecutors identified several small payments, totaling several thousand dollars,
that Hammoud and his cousins sent to Hezbollah. One receipt, from the offices of Mohammad Fadlallah, thanked Mohamad Darwiche for a $6,600 donation.
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Others included at least two donations of $1,300 from Mohamad Hammoud.
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But even adjusting for operating costs, seized assets, monies the conspirators reinvested in more cigarette purchases, or purchases of personal and business properties, hundreds of thousands of dollars remained unaccounted for.
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The testimony of several members of the conspiracy drove home the central tenet of the prosecution’s charges that some percentage of the funds raised through criminal activities or charitable contributions went to Hezbollah. According to Said Harb, in 1999 Mohamad Hammoud gave him an envelope containing $3,500 to deliver to Sheikh Abbas Harake, a Hezbollah military commander with whom Mohamad remained in regular contact.
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The two were very close, Harb testified, adding, “Pretty much any money that Mohamad generated in here from anything went to Abbas.”
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On the day Harb was scheduled to arrive in Beirut with the funds, Hammoud placed dozens of phone calls to Harake, apparently to confirm receipt of the money. Testifying in his own defense, Hammoud would claim that it happened to be his birthday, so he was calling all his friends that day. In fact, he called Harake fifty-seven times over the course of two days.
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Interestingly, Harb did not deliver the money to Harake personally, because Harake had once beaten Harb’s brother to the brink of death. He instead gave the envelope to his own mother to pass along to Hammoud’s mother. In fact, Harb admitted to carrying money to Lebanon for Hammoud on many occasions. On Harb’s yearly trips to the country, Hammoud sent up to $900 at a time with instructions to “give it to … my mom, my sister, whoever you find at the house,” according to Harb’s testimony.
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Some of that money is presumed to have gone to Hezbollah. As Bassam Hammoud commented to Mohamad in reference to the Hammoud family, “It’s known we’re all in the Hizb.”
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If anyone wanted to be sure the money they sent went to Hezbollah, Mohamad’s brother Chawki told a member of the Lebanese community in Charlotte, they should give it to him or his brother.
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As Mohamad Hammoud put it, “It’s our duty to help Hezbollah or our people back home…. That’s how we play our part.”
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